Gargantia

Only two episodes of Production I.G.'s new show, the awkwardly-named Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, have aired so far, and I'm quite excited about it. It's a mecha show and I'm always cautious with the genre as it can get a bit dull and predictable, even with all the explosions, but there's a lot of promising threads being set up that I'm hoping pay off.

It starts off on a strong foot - a massive space battle with mecha, ships and an insectoid alien enemy all with a very strong Gunbuster flavour. It sets up a huge interstellar war with a history and huge stakes - and then the lead character drops through a wormhole, landing on a planet long since assumed dead.

It's been a pretty slow burner despite that early bait-and-switch; even at the end of the second episode it's still very much in character setup mode, introducing the characters to both the audience and each other - they still can't understand each others' language¹. That second episode ends with the first real action scene (the space battle at the start of the pilot is kind of boring, if I'm honest), but it left a much stronger impression on me than I was expecting.

I'm hoping the characters in the show take a while to react to what's happened; it'd be a shame if, after taking its time moving the pieces into position for this chain of events, they get bored and skip past the aftermath of what amounts to a wholesale slaughter.

¹ The way this is handled is great; when they're talking to someone who speaks the same language, they just use Japanese; when they're talking to someone who speaks a different language, it's a garbled mess (possibly the same garbled mess). It's a great, if simple, obstacle to overcome that complicates the early interactions; they can't just explain their positions and rush on with the story.